Day 169 - Godzilla



Day 169          Godzilla [1998]
                          
Screenplay                    Dean Devlin & Roland Emmerich
Based on                       Toho’s ‘Godzilla’ franchise
Director                         Roland Emmerich
Cinematography            Ueli Steiger
Music                            David Arnold
Leads                            Matthew Broderick, Jean Reno, Maria Pitillo, Hank Azaria, Kevin Dunn, Michael Lerner, Harry Shearer, Doug Savant
Production                     Centropolis Entertainment, Fried Films, Independent Pictures

IMDb                                 5.3/10
Rotten Tomatoes                16%

This is a childhood favourite of mine, so nostalgia hit hard and I loved every second of it. Who doesn’t like seeing a gargantuan monster lizard charge around Manhattan destroying everything in its path? That’s just great television, as my old boss used to say. The CGI is pretty good considering it was way back in the late nineties – the same year that ‘The Furby’ was released and the iMac saved Apple from bankruptcy. Yes you can scrutinise a lot of it as unrealistic. For example, the epic ground shaking scene where Godzilla first appears on Manhattan. Godzilla then runs around for most of the film seemingly without a wobble, having previously made cars bounce. There are a lot more goofs like this one, but you are watching a one-hundred-foot lizard run around New York, should we really care about realism? No. We should just enjoy the action and the cheesy one liners regurgitated from other movies. I don’t know why the critics have been so harsh. The acting/writing is pretty appalling. And I suppose I always spend most of the movie waiting for the Godzilla scenes. It’s really not that bad though. It’s even given me a new idea for another section of the blog. Hold onto your hats! (That’s a Goonies quote for the cinephiles amongst you). No matter what you say, you're not going to get me to dislike this film. I've even worked out a piece of trivia just for you that you get to see the acting of sixty Simpsons characters in this film. If you can name the actors and more than half of those characters I'll send you a Russian bootleg LOTR Return of the King DVD signed by me. Who wouldn't want that.

Acting                           1.5 / 4
Writing                            2 / 4
Cinematography              3 / 4
Music                           2.5 / 4
HWF rating                 3 / 4

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